Review - American Jewish Archives

The Evangelist at Our Door 153
land.47 Rivka's conversion in Cahan's story had nothing to do with
religious beliefs; she embraced Christianity in order to marry a
man she loved. But her relationship with her husband did not re-
place the close family ties she was privileged to have had before
her marriage. She becomes lonely and isolated and yearns for the
warmth and support her former Jewish environment had provided
her before her conversion. She begins an emotional, social, and
geographical journey home to her family and religion. But her love
for her husband does not allow her to settle back down with her
family, She is again on the road, miserable, restless, and devastated.
Although Cahan portray his fictional heroine with sympathy and
compassion, he nonetheless describes her as a torn, tormented per-
son, a lost soul. Cahan, a secular socialist, followed the traditional
Jewish outlook of the meshumadim, "the self-destroyed." In his de-
scription, which well reflected the popular Jewish outlook of the
time, joining Christianity was merely a social decision, devoid of
spiritual or theological persuasion. It was an unfortunate decision
based on miscalculation, for the new environment could not offer
the warmth, security and clear sense of identity the Jewish commu-
nity offered. Converts were wandering souls rejected in one com-
munity and strangers in the other. Cahan's short story, originally
published in a general American literary magazine, clearly re-
vealed the resentment of Jews, including secular ones, toward
apostates that was just as strong in America as in Europe. Jews in
Cahan's story could neither understand the heroine's choice nor
tolerate it and refused to relate to her again, unless she recanted. In
their world a meshumadeste was what it literally meant: she was
someone who destroyed herself.
A particularly sensitive issue for both the masses of Jewish immi-
grants and the Jewish elite was the evangelism of children. Jews felt
particularly vulnerable because they considered children to be more
"in danger" of being influenced by missionaries. In this case, too, the
heated Jewish reaction could be misleading. Evidently, many in the
immigrant community allowed their children to attend educational
and recreational activities sponsored by missionaries, overlooking
the evangelization agenda that sponsored such enterprises. For
many Jewish children, using the missionary facilities meant merely
that-using them, with no lasting effects on their religious persua-